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 great region of the globe would be confirmed and consolidated, and would have free scope for increased usefulness. The men of vision and of humanitarian instincts, the men who regard the administration of these races as a high duty and a high privilege, would be encouraged by the thought that they were supported by piogressive and coalesced international influences: that an organised international moral force had been created upon which they could rely. A halt would be called to manifold errors and injustices which the absence of an international mechanism making for just and wise government and ensuring international publicity for the affairs of the tropical Continent, had rendered possible in the past. It would be perceived that the duty and the legitimate interests of Europe in tropical Africa lay on the same path. It would come to be regarded not only as right in essence, but expedient in practice, that government in tropical Africa should aim at establishing the well-being, self-respect and intellectual advancement of the native population. Philanthropic effort directed to the welfare and progress of the tropical African peoples would everywhere be strengthened, and the public conscience in the various European States governing in tropical Africa could be more easily invoked for the remedy and removal of abuses.

And out of this awakening and purifying process would grow a wider concept of the latent mental powers and spiritual potentialities of these African peoples, and a keener realisation of the great and noble task which unselfish effort could undertake among them. We should look back with horror and shame at a past in which the African, arbitrarily sundered from his land, his social and family life, ground out a life of servile toil, with no beacon of hope, no incentive to rise, no other stimulus to labour than starvation and the lash. For the first time in the history of contact between the white races and the black, the black man's burden would be lifted from the shoulders which for five hundred years have bent beneath its weight.